Monday, July 3, 2017

published as Ideologies are Myopic by Financial Chronicle on June 26th, Delhi

Secularism, Socialism and Social Good

While multinationals have stabilised in
India, and recruitment portals are replete with the statistics of employment,
we have to look at the various spaces people occupy mentally, while serving the
nation.

Ideologies tincture our worlds. We presume
that right wing ideologies are totalitarian, but then, so were left wing ones.
And those who were fence sitters, representing the right to remain neutral,
were generally vacuous. When India won it’s Freedom, from the British, the
Gandhi Nehru leadership had it’s moments of extreme tension, since mutual
dialogue was not always possible. Industrialisation and Nehru’s “new temples of
India”, have always communicatedthat
the Nation knows best. As a result rural people are always buttressed between
the world they have known, and the rights to tradition, which they hold so
sacred, and the sensibilities of the elite, who mark them as backward, ignorant
and superstitious. Worse, they often play on these sentiments in a bid to bring
them to their side of the fence.

A former Naxalfrom St Stephen’s College, once said that
they had to leave the villages because the villagers could no longer feed
them.The daughter of a famousBJP politician said that actually they were
like everyone else, but for reasons of political gain, they played the Hindutva
card. “Like everyone else” in the late seventies, when the Jan Sangh flags were
beginning to flutter in places like Ashram and Lajpat Nagar, in New Delhi,
meant “modern, anglophile and looking towards America as the site of popular
cultural consumption.”

It is not surprising,then, that forms of socialisation make us
perceive agriculture as something that industrialisation should promote,
trampling the interests of the farmer with small holdings, underground. That
two and half acres is the national average for producing bumber crops is
something Indians should beproud of.
However,that industrial elites look to
colonising everything is a self evident fact. The joint stock companies, sociologists
argued in the1960s, created a buffer
between bourgeoisie and proletariat. That was when the factory was the mode of
organising, and joint investments integrated a rising middle class into the
profits to be made by investing in companies. Today, however, as the
Sociologist Daniel Bell foresaw, it is the laboratory that predominates, and
since secrecy and surveillance are its bywords, the oligarchy of scientists
excludes the common masses from decision making, and ‘fear and trembling’ are
the natural consequences.

Socialism, co-operatives, unions all become
redundant in these new economies. Political organisation in these new States
disclose that federation is irrelevant when it comes to the colonisation of
rivers, mountains, fertile lands, deserts, even the sea. The commons are
considered to be the right of exploitation by contract to private parties, for
enhancement of industrial goals. Tribals and peasants are rendered even more
marginal. Craft communities are deprived of their natural skills, as their
poverty forces them into manual labour for construction.Since they are dehumanised, they are merely
paid minimum wages and left to their skills as a lumpen proletariat to survive
in the midst of real problems such as infant mortality, maternal mortality, and
decrepitude in old age. Caste comes in as a useful explanation for their
condition, as everything is blamed on their previous life. Consensus about
religious participation between upper castes and lower castes leads to euphoric
states during ritual events. Merchants and workers combine to engage in
participation where the presence of Gods and Goddesses further elaborates this
forced servitude upon thelower castes.
The depletion in the numbers of theworking class members enrolled in Unions is only too apparent.

Socialism by itself, without it’s self
regulating mechanisms leads to tremendous inefficiency. Theindustrial barons, as debtors to
Nationalised Banks, clearly represent the way in which the bourgeoisie are able
to thwart the codes of modern banking and send the entire nation into paroxysms
as we saw in the winter of 2016. Earlier recessions had not disturbed the
Indian economy because of the resilience of post box economies which nestled in
the Post Office, and ofcourse keeping money under the bed, and in cupboard by
housewives who always managed to stow away savings for a rainy day.The mountains of cash which surfaced are
still to be recycled, after being shredded, to make notebooks for government
school children.

The second example of Socialism without
legitimation is ofcourse Air India.There is a category known as tickets for
LTC, which charges more than the sum routinely charged by Airlines companies
for air tickets, by several thousands. If the government employees do not book
through a company called Laurie and Balmer (some relic mnemonic from the past)
the tickets are not refunded by the government. So this is a form of
corruption, as the government siphons money from one account to uphold another.